Top 19 Competitor Analysis Tools [With Simple Tutorials On How to Use Them]

Are you looking for QUICK ways to make your blog profitable? Do you know there’s ONE little technique used widely by most successful marketers to quickly build million dollar blogs?

That one nifty way to rapidly grow a profitable blog is called “competitor analysis”.

If you want to build a successful blog, doing competitor analysis is a must.

Before entering into any niche, analyzing the competition helps you with three things.

You can better understand about your target audience: Obviously, without focusing on your target audience needs and wants, you can never build a better blog that makes profits online.

You can find out how many links to build to rank higher: Backlinks help you rank higher and faster in search results. The more number of quality backlinks you have the better search results you get even for highly competitive keyword phrases.

You can easily find out what keywords to target: Keyword research is the key to build a high traffic blog. Without targeting the right keywords, you can’t increase both your search engine traffic and website sales. It’s as simple as that.

After all, there’s no big mistake other than entering into a highly competitive niche, spending most of your time on creating content and getting no result! That sucks, right?

What is competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the big players (blogs and brands) in an industry. It gives you a better idea on the pros and cons of any niche.

It doesn’t matter what niche you are going to dive in, doing a proper competitor analysis will help you better understand about your market. In short, competitor analysis gives you a birds eye view about your target market.

Why it’s important?

Doing a full competitor analysis helps you better understand about your competition. It tells you how big or small your market is before entering into a niche. It also gives you where to focus on to get bigger and faster results.

How to do competitive analysis?

Now, if you are wondering how to do a detailed competitive analysis to better understand about your audience, keywords to target, products to promote etc., let me help you with this post.

There are so many competitor SEO tools out there which help you fully analyze the competition without much struggle. If you are looking for easy and fast ways to do competitive analysis, I’ve compiled a list of 19 of the best competitor analysis tools in this post.

A caveat: This is a HUGE post with around 2,000 words and I made sure to include ONLY the best competitor analysis tools to help you out. I also made sure to include simple tutorials on how to use each one of those competitor SEO tools.

So are you ready to find out the top 19 competitor’s analysis tools to try in 2018 and beyond? Let’s get started.

19 Competitor Analysis Tools You Must Try

SEMrush has been one of my most favorite SEO tools for doing competitor analysis. It’s one of the finest tools not only to analyse the competition but also for increasing your overall website search traffic.

Step 2: SEMrush will now give you the FULL details of the domain you entered which includes the organic search, backlinks count, top keywords that are sending that domain most traffic, organic positions, main competitors, number of indexed pages and a whole lot of information.

Step 3: Once you figure out how much competition you have by looking at all the necessary things like main organic competitors, number of backlinks you need to build to rank higher, top organic keywords along with the search volume, you can easily find out whether or not to jump into a particular niche.

Step 4: Finding the top performing keywords that are helping your competitors to increase their overall search traffic. Have a look at the following screenshot to find all the top keywords that are driving most of the traffic to Problogger.net in search results.

Now, all you need to do with that keyword list is to whether or not to decide to start jumping into the niche you want. Make no mistake, keyword research is the only way to increase your overall website traffic. Without targeting the right keywords with less competition, it’s impossible to build a massive blog that gets both traffic and sales.

You can know about important features of SEMrush tool from my review here and Click This Link to Try SEMrush for free for the next 30 days.

Long Tail Pro is another incredible tool mainly used for finding low competitive long tail keywords. It’s one of the widely used keyword research tools and also used by the marketing professionals like Pat Flynn, Marcus Sheridan etc. You can read my review of Long Tail Pro from here.

Most people don’t know that Long Tail Pro can also be used for doing competitor analysis. If you are wondering how to do it with Long Tail Pro tool, follow the simple tutorial given below.

Step 1: Enter any name to create a project (you need to download and install the tool first).

Quick Tip: Go through this post to find out how to easily perform keyword research with Long Tail Pro keyword research tool.

Step 2: Now after entering any keyword of your choice, Long Tail Pro will fetch you a lot of relevant long tail keywords along with the monthly search volume. I highly recommended you to pick keywords that have monthly searches below 1000 to 2000 to get better and faster results.

Step 3: Now when you click on any of the keyword suggestion given by Long Tail Pro, it will show you all the necessary information that is enough to analyze your competition. In the below example, I’m taking the keyword “ipad mini with retina display” and when I click on it, Long Tail Pro shows me all the required information to find out the keyword competition in search results.

With the above details, you can decide whether or not to jump into any niche by knowing the competition and monthly search volume of certain keywords.

SpyFu is the #1 tool to find and download all your competitor’s most profitable keywords and ads for both paid and organic search. You can search and find any domain that gets huge traffic, you can also find what are the keywords that are driving them the most traffic. Every keyword, every organic rank is shown up using this tool.

Here’s the simple tutorial on how to analyse your competitors with SpyFu.

Step 1: Enter any domain of your competitor’s.

Step 2: It will now show you the full details of the domain you enter.

In this example, I’m using QuickSprout and when I enter that domain, SpyFu is showing me the below information.

See the above screenshot? It shows me all the information like organic keywords, keywords that are just made to first page, number of clicks and paid keywords (if there are any). With that information, you can easily analyze how hard your targeted niche is.

Step 3: On the left hand side, it will also show you so much information like competition, best performing keywords, links etc.

Here’s the top performing keywords of QuickSprout.

You can now use Long Tail Pro or SEMrush to see the competition of the keywords listed above. That gives you a clear idea on whether or not to pick a niche.

#4. Quicksprout

If you are blogging for a while, you might already heard about Neil Patel. He is one of the most successful online marketers who have built 4 multi-million dollar online businesses including QuickSprout, Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics.

His online marketing blog Quicksprout is read by over million readers every single month. His posts are insanely useful and anyone can learn by reading his marketing articles.

On Quicksprout, he recently also launched a tool which makes it easier for you not only to analyse your competitors but also to create better content to grow your traffic.

Here’s how to use Quicksprout to analyze the competition.

Step 1: Go to Quicksprout home page and enter the domain of any of your competitor’s by logging into your Gmail account.

Step 2: Now, the irritating part is that it asks for you to invite 5 of your friends to sign up for QuickSprout. Once you are done with it, you can gain access to the tool for free.

Step 3: Now it will show you all the data which you can use to analyze the competition. It will show your entered domain’s top competitors along with the details like estimated traffic score, SEO score, speed score and social share score.

By knowing the above metrics, you can easily find out how hard or easy it is for you to outrank your competitors before entering into any niche.

If you are blogging for a while, you might not need any introduction to Alexa. It is definitely one of the best competitor analysis tools out there which is also free. Millions of bloggers use Alexa toolbar, browser plugins and extensions worldwide to analyze stats of a website or blog.

Here’s how you can use Alexa to easily analyse the competition.

Step 1: Go to Alexa.com and enter any domain name that you want to analyze. You can freely sign up for Alexa using either your email or Facebook account.

Step 2: Alexa will now display all the information about the site you entered. It will show you how popular the domain is along with the global rank, monthly traffic stats, the percent of visitors visiting from a country, bounce rate, daily pageviews per visit, daily time spent on the site etc.

Step 3: The best part about Alexa is that it will also show the top performing keywords of the domain you enter. Have a look the screenshot below to find the popular keywords of Problogger.net.

With the above information, you can easily figure out how much percentage of search traffic is coming through certain keywords for your competitors. That gives you a clear idea while doing competitor analysis.

This tool is owned by Hubspot and it can be used to monitor your competitor’s social activities, lead generation success, and blogging/SEO success. The tool provides you the overall score of your competitor based on the above-mentioned areas.

You can also use it to check your own site performance on mobile, SEO and security. This will enable you to further know what you need to do on your to outsmart your competitors.

If you need information about the domain/IP address and other domains that belong to your competitor, make use of this tool. It equally provides you a breakdown of the sources of traffic to your competitor’s site.

Once you type the URL of your competitor into the dialogue box, you are shown his other sites (if any), his Google Adsense code, sites linking to him, etc. With that, you can do a lot.

Price: Free

How Best to Use this Tool

Discover the different IP addresses of your competitors to find their domain information

With Google keyword Planner, you can easily generate keywords for your site. The tool also helps you find competitor keyword data (organic and paid) and also helps you monitor your own website and your competitor’s website.

The tool does not completely focus on competitor’s analysis. The price is free, though you have to sign up for an Adwords account.

Price: Free when you have a free Google account.

How Best to Use this Tool

Monitor both the paid and organic traffic of your competitors

Monitor your own website and see what keywords you can rank for.

#9. Social Mention

This is another tool you can use to spy on your competitors site to monitor what is being said about them. What you need do is to enter a search term – company or keyword – you will be shown what’s being said concerning the company on social networks, blogs, etc.

You have the option to subscribe to their RSS to enable you get updates whenever they make new publications. It is also a free tool to use.

It’s another tool that enables you spy on your competitors’ site. With it, you can add a bookmarklet to your bookmark bar to enable you visit your competitor’s site at later date. It is easy to save web pages and then return to read/visit them later.

It makes it easy for you to visit the site of your competitor and save contents that could be useful to you.

With this tool, it is easy to track your competitor. You get alerted when he publishes a new blog post and the keywords he’s using or when he is mentioned online. What you will get include your competitor’s backlinks, keyword mentions, and social mentions.

Price: Free

How to use this Tool

Monitor competitors keyword mentions

Get competitors backlinks

Track competitors social media mentions

#13. Rival fox

Rival fox provides you insight into the digital marketing strategies adopted by your rivals and helps you measure your progress against your competitors in clear graphs. Only what is really important is shown to you.

This tool helps you measure your performance against your competitors as well as the industry. Social Bakers enables you have an insight into your competitors’ promoted posts on social media.

The insight you gain will help you publish better content at the right time. It equally helps you manage all your social channels in one place. It’s simply a tool to help you know how your competitors are spending their money.

Price: Between $50 and $400 per month, with a 14-day free trial period.

It’s a handy tool to spy on your competitors site by getting information on their ranking on target regions and search engines. With this tool, you will be able to discover the websites that belong to the same person.

This tool, though relatively new in the business, allows you to easily spy on your competitors site and use the knowledge you acquire to improve yours. With it, you can follow the backlinks of different competitors and have them sent to your mailbox.

The tool analyses the link based on the grading of the domain (lower or higher ranks), “do follow” or “no follow” links. It assists you in your new link-building opportunities. You get notification when your competitor gains or loses backlinks.

Pricing: From $19/month (for 2 accounts), $49.99/month (for 5 accounts) to $99.99 (for 10 accounts). If your need is more than 10 websites, you have to discuss the management.

Spying on your competitor’s site is made easy with the Similar Web tool. Just type in the URL of any website and you will be provided with country rank, global ranks, and category rank, including a graph indicating the number of weekly visitors in the previous 6 months. You can add a competitor or allow the system to suggest to you the competitors to watch.

This tool shows you the IPs, top pages, and the external links to your competitors’ site. It also helps you in tracking your own keywords, backlinks, and brand mentions. It shows you the keywords your competitors are ranking for, and also sends you a mail when you or your competitors gain or lose backlinks.

This is the last but not the least tool you can use to spy on your competitor’s site. Majestic SEO makes it possible for you to download your competitor’s site’s link profile. With the tool, you have an access to the hundreds or thousands of links on your competitors’ site.

The information you get gives you an insight into what is giving your rival an upper hand in his campaigns.

So there you go, those are the top 19 competitor analysis tools you can try to better understand about your competitors, their keywords and traffic sources.

Note: I’ll be updating the page with the latest and more useful SEO competitor analysis tools in the future. So make sure to bookmark the page if you want to make the most out of it.

Final Thoughts on the Top Competitor Analysis Tools

Whether you are already blogging for a while or thinking to launch a new blog, you need to evaluate your competition. Competitor analysis helps you not only to increase your chances of getting more traffic but also sales.

The top 19 competitor analysis tools mentioned in this page are absolutely incredible. Even a beginner who never analyzed their competition can find those tools easy to use.

As I said earlier in the article, it’s crucial to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors if you want to get an edge over them. Without analysing them, you will struggle a lot to take your blog to the next level.

So what are you waiting for? If you are using any one of the tools mentioned here, do let me know your thoughts about them. Also mention your favorite competitor analysis tools in the comment section below.

Keyword research is always tend to be one of the main factor that enables to allow more and more
traffic to one’s niche.
This post is of great help. Your Competitor Analysis tool could be very helpful in getting,
full knowledge about our competitors in the market and how to over come them on the edge point.

Everybody is here for making more and more money. These 5 tools are of great help and
the tutorials you provided with, makes them such an easy way to operate them.
Didn’t know that Long Tail Po could also be used for checking our competitors.

Hi,
Thanks for sharing this useful post with us. Keyword research is always really matters a lot to drive website as well as blog traffic. All tools you have mentioned are really great and much helpful.
Thanks!

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